ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

s(S)peculative r(R)ealism & philosophy-as-life

It’s nice to see Speculative Realism capturing the attention of SF writer and all-round idea impresario Bruce Sterling – see his Speculative Realism as “philosophy fiction.” As a long-time SF lover, the idea of “philosophy fiction” has always appealed to me. Some of the best writing in the genre has been profoundly metaphysical, which is to say speculatively realist.

One little point: Process-relational philosophies have long been speculative and realist. And many of these (along with a lot of ecophilosophy of the last 25 years) reject the centrality of the human-world “correlation,” just as Quentin Meillassoux did in his 2006 book that has been so influential for the Speculative Realists (caps intended).* Whitehead’s Process and Reality is perhaps the most obvious modern example of a speculative metaphysic that is realist through and through, but there have been plenty of others.

Perhaps what we need is for sociologists of philosophy (like Randall Collins) to tell us why the idea of “speculative realism” hasn’t taken off until now… and why it seems to be doing that now. But the actual practice of it — speculative realism in lower-case — isn’t that new or that unpopular: witness Whitehead’s popularity in theological circles, Deleuze and Guattari’s in artistic and political circles (though it’s not always the realism that gets picked up), ecophilosophy’s among environmentalists, and scientific speculative realism’s popularity all over the place (from Bohm and Prigogine and Hawking to the pop-science literature on string theory, chaos, and the “tao of physics”). Philosophy of a sort (organized, academic) is catching up to all of that, which is nice.

As an aside: The other kind of philosophy that has been taking off for a while now, as any browser of bookstores knows, is pop-philosophy along the lines of “X… and Philosophy,” where the “X” is The Simpsons, The Matrix, Star Trek, Star Wars, Steven Spielberg, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, South Park, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, The Atkins Diet (no kidding), or whatever else. A few more titles I’d like to see in this vein: “Captain Beefheart and Philosophy,” “Lady Gaga and Philosophy,” “Gong and Philosophy” (that’s the Franco-British psychedelic rock band), or at least “The Soft Machine and Philosophy” (1960s-70s bands are in now, aren’t they?)… If I had anything useful to award, I would give it to the reader who came up with the most original idea here…

Fortunately, the older style of philosophy-as-way-of-life books (I’m thinking of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and others in that vein) hasn’t faded out completely either, as the initial responses to James Miller’s (The Passion of Michel Foucault) new Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche might suggest. The proof of philosophy is always in the living, but whether the living results from the philosophy or the philosopher is always a little difficult to determine.

Which brings me to my main point: Process-relational themes lend themselves extremely well to philosophy-as-life; it’s one of their key ideas. Does that mean that a quick glance at the philosophies of, say, Peirce or James or Whitehead will reveal to us their political commitments or their social activism (or lack thereof)? It’s not that clear. Add Deleuze, Spinoza, and the Buddhists to the picture and it’s probably even less clear.

But it’s worth asking: what, if anything, is the common denominator, when it comes to living one’s philosophy, among the long list of names that fit into the process-relational tradition?

My first guess would be that some combination of the following two traits, or shared intuitions, would be fairly common: (1) a trust in life process, or as Deleuze calls it, a “belief in this world,” and (2) a willingness to experiment — an openness and even eagerness to engage in things decisively so as to see where they will go, and a willingness to change directions when it becomes evident that they aren’t going where they ought to be (or to go along gleefully for the experience, if it’s a good one). (Buddhists don’t necessarily follow the first, which is why it’s useful to distinguish between life-affirming and life-escaping strains of that tradition.)

The second point sounds a little like what one might expect from Speculative Realism, and from “philosophy fiction” — except that process-relationalism insists on not just speculating, or fictionalizing, but living it. If we enter into our relations fully, then those relations count. There’s no safe haven to which our deepest essence can withdraw. Actions cannot be taken back. The doing changes the array of potentialities for the next set of possible doings.

Those two intuitions, incidentally, parallel the two key ideas I expressed in this earlier post, between which process-relational philosophies dance like a high-wire walker:

(1) Dependent origination, i.e., an ontology of interdependence: Nothing exists on its own, everything passes into something else. This is the Nagarjunian, Heraclitean point […]

and

(2) This-momentness: The core of our being is the ethical call in this very moment to engage with that which we find ourselves interacting with, and to do it in a way that recognizes our responsibility for what emerges from it. This is the Whiteheadian point, and the Deleuzian (and Bergsonian) one: we are, in this moment, becoming, actualizing; we draw out and in, folding over from one enfoldment to the next. The same is true for all things.

Call these the anti-essentialist and the existentialist halves of the process-relational walnut. The first without the second would result in the kind of relationalist wash the OOO-ists have critiqued. The second without the first is existentialism without the bearings of the universe, Sartrean nausée without any sense for doing anything, Nietzschean will to power without the eternal return of the same.

The first is what tells us who we are (where we come from, what we’re indebted and related to, and what’s worth keeping from that legacy). The second is what makes us play for keeps.

*Note: The date originally given was a mistake. Après la finitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence was released in French in 2006, and in Ray Brassier’s English translation in 2008.

5 Responses

I believe we have to see this in the context of postmodernism, as both a tendency in philosophy and as a historical reality up until the late 90s and early 00s. The new realism and speculative metaphysics in philosophy today is not just a break from that postmodern era; it’s not just something new in a linear history of thought. I believe it’s also a turn, both a turn around postmodernism and a turn away from it. It’s both progressive and it’s a synthesis in some way, between earlier speculative metaphysics (Whitehead) and postmodern thought (Deleuze). I tend to look towards the art world when trying to understand our own time. The 90s, in the art world, was all about relational aesthetics, conceptualized by Nicolas Burriaud in his book from 1998. But recent years there’s been a new interest in things, objects, in art as something that affects, but also as something being affected by it’s environment (that being us visiting an exhibition, the location of the exhibition, etc.). I’m too young to know this, but I’m told that in the 90s you never got to touch the art objects. It was strictly forbidden. Often there wasn’t any objects at all (objects in the normal sense). It could only be an empty room. The art work was the people inside that room, the ones visiting the exhibition. That was relational aesthetics, and it didn’t even have to be any objects exhibited. Recent years, though, there’s been more talking about something called thing aesthetics and thing theory (here’s a reading list as an example: http://objectresearchlab.wordpress.com/object-reading-list/). Why this is happening in the art world as well, it’s not easy to say.

I too would like to see a sociological explanation for why SR and why now. We need a bright sociology student of Collin’s to write up SR as a case study. It seems like a unique opportunity.

From what I can see there appears to be a few factors at work:

1) Americans a groping about for the next -ism after Derrida’s death. At first people landed on older thinkers who hadn’t been translated (Badiou) but wanted to find the next generation too.
2) a healthy dose of “kill your masters” from the younger generation [this includes throwing the baby out with the bathwater from the previous generation. if we can predict the next mutation to happen it might be rehabilitating the dead masters to critique and extend SR]
3) just like New York stole the art world during WWII it’s looking like England and the US are stealing continental philosophy right now. After you baptise the continental tradition in the anglo-american psyche maybe you end up with a variety of weird realisms.
4) of course there is the Internet/blogs mixing grad students and amateurs into the conversation, hivemind doing theory.
5) different aesthetic sensibilities, drawing from sci-fi, horror, fantasy (this is one of the odder aspects of SR to me personally since I don’t share this sensibility).
6) the return of the repressed in the continental tradition (math, science, logic).
7) the academic industry cranking out more and more PhD’s full of weird influences. How many people were doing theory when Foucault was a student in the early 50’s vs. how many are doing theory today? The shear volume changes things dramatically.
8) speed from thought to print, rapid dissemination of ideas. This is another thing I wonder about, will SR be challenged and replaced quickly by several other self-defined ‘movements’? Hard to say, but things happen so quickly now.

I tend to think the pop-culture and philosophy books have more to do with the particulars of the publishing industry.

Christian – Yes, that’s a good insight about postmodernism, and an interesting thought about art. I think that a variant on the sociological question could be ‘why did postmodernism take the form that it did?’ (i.e. the kind described by Fred Jameson, et al) rather than other potential forms (e.g., the Whiteheadian ‘constructive postmodernism’ as David Ray Griffin called it)? It’s tied up with the deeper history of philosophy, including the linguistic turn and all that (discourse, social constructivism)…

But looking to art can remind us that there’ve been interesting art movements all along… There’s been a long emphasis on materiality going back through the performance art and feminist art genres, land and environmental art (and more recent ecological art), to Arte Povera and even the Dadaist found-object tradition. This hasn’t necessarily all been about objects, but it’s been about things, or processes, or actions, taking place in real environments. Very different from the discursive/idealist conceptual art tradition.

Thomas – You point out a lot of the relevant factors, and I think I agree with all of them to some extent. The confluence of 1-2 (groping around for a new -ism, and killing your masters while you’re at it) and 4-5-7 (internet/blogging, associated aesthetic sensibilities, academic productivity/theory, etc.) account for a good part of it, I’m sure.

“After you baptise the continental tradition in the anglo-american psyche maybe you end up with a variety of weird realisms.” I wonder if “anglo-american psyche” isn’t too broad a term here, since that psyche can be dry & analytical as well (as analytical philosophy shows). Perhaps the (post-)postmodern (or hypermodern) anglo-american psyche, the youthful one that’s already been baptised in a thorough immersion within a hyper-productive commodity capitalism, and that wants to regurgitate (vomit) it all up into artistic/philosophical expression…

I also agree that the speeding up of philosophical (and literary) production will likely mean that SR is only a moment, to be replaced by the next thing. That happens a lot in the social sciences – discourse, identity, embodiment, materiality, etc etc etc. But I also think that there’s an ineradicable pluralism within philosophy (and social theory, etc) that hasn’t been well recognized in some of the grander proclamations about SR – it’s hardly ascended to any kind of paradigmatic status. It’s a movement among movements, a node among nodes – a very interesting one, but hardly the new paradigm.

And I think you’re right about the pop-philosophy genre being an artifact of the publishing industry.

I’m not sure if SR will only be a moment or if it will end up absorbing new developments and lasting for roughly a generation of thinkers. Both seem plausible to me.

In a certain way I think SR was lucky in terms of timing. The thinkers are all relatively young and will likely have long and productive publishing careers. Just like many people tried to pronounce the death of deconstruction Derrida kept on publishing and kept on being very relevant, sometimes absorbing critiques and sometimes brushing them off.

A few fun counterfactuals to day dream about:

#1 What if Derrida were still alive today? Would SR have had a harder time establishing itself? Would Derrida be writing books about why SR is all wrong, or about why he was SR avant la lettre? (my vote is that he would be writing something telling us how he is neither a realist nor an idealist, I’d love to read it).

#2 What if an atomic bomb and landed on Paris around 1975 wiping out the last great generation of thinkers? Would Peirce and Whitehead have taken over? Would German thought have been stronger? Would Eastern philosophy gotten more attention? It seems like something would have taken over from the younger generation and that in that case SR might be very unlucky in its timing, the ground was not prepared and its rivals would be too dominant.

The other fun thing to think about is what kinds of ideas SR might suppress if it starts to function as a kind of new dogma? What kind of philosophy would go neglected but secretly doing really incredible stuff waiting for the next generation to find it? It doesn’t seem like idealism is really the right answer to this, nor outright relationalism. Both are already to big to really stop. Who’s name is mud under SR’s reign. Husserl? Schopenhauer? Hegel? Not quite right either, it needs to be someone a little smaller, awesome but not so big that they will always be revered. Bergson? Or maybe someone more contemporary.

I love SR, I think it is the most stimulating thing going on right now and what Collins would call a “hot center” but when push comes to shove I’m probably some kind of idealist of the Lacanian variety (not that I’m an expert on Lacan or anything).